OffShaw shrilling overstates ‘great Green change’

In his latest newsletter James Shaw seems very happy about his party’s successes to date in Government, but he is overstating achievements a bit.

You got the Greens into Government and now you’re seeing the results.

This is what great green change looks like: No new drilling for fossil fuels in the oceans of Aotearoa!

I think that is inaccurate. There has been a ban on new offshore permits, but existing permits can still be used to drill new wells.

This is gigantic! Just the push back from oil companies alone proves how huge this is.

It may be big compared to green achievements in the past, but there is a lot of debate about what effect it will have in practice.

It will limit future exports of oil and gas, and local use of gas could be affected, but until practical large scale alternatives are found to fossil fuels for vehicles (including trains and planes) in particular New Zealand will have to keep importing oil.

And we could not have done it without you.

This campaign started decades ago and has taken the hard work of people, like you, who’ve participated in many different ways to support the stopping of fossil fuel extraction from our oceans.

For years we’ve shone a spotlight on the perils of the continued use of fossil fuels and its threat to our very existence. We know that the world cannot burn the 80% of the reserves we already know about if we are to have any hope of stopping catastrophic climate change. We know that our wellbeing and the wellbeing of our planet demand that we move to cleaner, lower emission ways of doing business and of living our lives.

The permit ban is a battle win, but the fossil fuel and climate change wars are far from over.

We’ve drawn a line in the sand. So now, not only are we taking climate action, but also our beaches, our whales and our Māui dolphins are much safer because of this decision.

I think that ‘much safer’ substantially also overstates the changes gained.

Shaw goes on the Ra Ra! the troops, with the inevitable pleas for donations, but if he oversells successes too often Green supporters may become jaded.

For the first time ever, we’re making the environment a major priority in transport. From now on, transport spending must focus on reducing climate pollution as well as other negative impacts on public health such as water quality.

And finally, no more taxpayer subsidies of large scale irrigation!

Cleaning up our rivers just got real! Thanks to our confidence and supply agreement, the Government is winding down taxpayer subsidies for large scale irrigation schemes that lead to over-intensive land-use.

Another massive win for the Greens and for you!

A lot of work was already being done on cleaning up waterways. A recent report showed that river quality has been improving over the last few years. More Green pressure will help, but a lot is happening regardless.

Perhaps loyal Green supporters will buy Shaw’s exaggerations, but most voters are more likely to be swayed to open their wallets by the Briscoe’s lady – who has toned down a lot lately.

In decades we may be able to look back on great Green change, but at this early stage it sounds like too much offShaw shrilling.

Kitty Catkin

Shaw is not sounding so confident on RNZ right now promoting a rebate for electric vehicles – paid for by other car buyers.

ON NOW: Consumers may pay more for petrol, energy & possibly their cars under new proposals being considered by govt. Climate Change Minister @jamespeshaw says he's looking at a tax on imported petrol vehicles, using $ to subsidise electric cars. https://t.co/JQMAypYAbx

Kitty Catkin

I am sure that the people whose petrol will cost 75c a litre more will mind this very much. That will make it nearly $3 a litre. If the Greens believe that this will be anything other than a vote-killer, they are insane !

sarineal

NZ could turn into the Cuba of the pacific. They talk about a tax on imported vehicles but last I noticed the domestic car industry died in the 1990’s so that means a tax on all petrol and diesel vehicles. There is no alternative for consumers.

EV’s are in short supply and expensive and any subsidy (if it doesn’t vanish into the consolidated fund) won’t make them cheap enough for your average person and the extra tax on newer vehicles will make them cost prohibitive too. There are also a ton of other issues still to be fixed too, like the range and power needed from the grid to charge them.

Like Cuba, what will happen is the average person will need to resort to either keeping an old gas guzzler on the road and/or the gas guzzler private used car market keeping the things on the road longer. That will be fun, I hear the average car is about 20 years old already and the fleet will continue to age further. And, no, no-one will be hopping on their bikes or walking en masse many kilometres away in the middle of winter in a southerly storm.

They should be putting the groundwork into place with stages that are manageable before declaring the ultimate goal.

I hope they’ve also thought of food security in all of this, it’s one thing to also ban subsidies of irrigation but fruit and veges require an awful lot of water and it does bring in rather a large amount of money. Like it pays for the health care budget. But I suppose the economy takes a back seat to rhetoric and carefully considered changes at a pace that can be coped with.

admiralvonspee

Griff

ROFL
Power is not the problem.
Forget the phone charger…type c usb.
Dont have one of them at the beach and I am to tight to spend twenty bucks for a new one .

As too Germany
After Fukushima they decided to close all nuclear plants as they view the risk to great . Shutting down nuclear has the support of 75 % of voters so It is not just backed by the greens .
Hence even though green energy is growing the reduction of CO2 has not come about because they are using coal to make up for the loss of nuclear power.

Volkswagon and other German car makers screwed the pooch with their diesels emissions cheating.
As a result germany has seen a shift to petrol cars that creates more CO2 per mile than diesels do.

Electric cars sales are doubling ever year in Germany. The sort of growth that will make transport renewable in just a few years .
All around the world electric cars are under the same growth curve.

Is it not funny that reality and rwnj bullshite don’t coincide.

.

Grimm

One day you should go to Germany Griff and visit some of their coal mines. Make a special trip to the Garzweiler mine. The scale of it will make you weep. Germany are the biggest users of lignite coal (the dirty kind) in Europe, maybe the world. That’s because they dumped Nuclear. They have plenty of new coal power stations being built (plus around 1500 world wide) to replace nuclear and as backups for wind.

Electric cars are currently a fraud perpetrated on the poor. Billions have been spent on electric car subsidies. They may remove emissions from cities, but only to put them somewhere else. No electric car sells in volume without taxpayer subsidy, and even then they are bought by rich people. No country in the world has an electricity grid capable of dealing with even half of their cars being electric. You might also be surprised at the scale of mining that will be required to supply the raw ingredients for electric cars. If you are using a device that requires USB-C, then you are contributing to the operation of at least four large scale open cast mines somewhere in the world. Did I mention the environmental problems we face getting rid of the batteries?

All green policies come with unintended consequences that are worse than the original “problem”.

Griff

ROFL
I just pointed out why Germany has had a hiccup in the move towards renewable energy. it is nothing like some like to pretend it is because of retiring nuclear plants that they deem to risky .

As to the rest of your vacant ranting.
What a load of unsupportable waffle.
I don’t have a problem with mining thats totally in your head .
In case you did not know I am not and never have been a green supporter. I was a paid up ACT member since their inception.
After having seen the sort of nonsense right wing nut jobs get so easily sucked in by I no longer identify as right wing.

Grimm

Griff

As usual Griff posts up his picture but doesn’t tell the full story. bullshit and reality colliding again. There is a massive subsidy of 4000 euro a car in Germany, that started at the beginning of 2016. As one the German papers noted at the time,
“The German government is prepared to spend up to a billion euros ($1.12 billion) during the next two years to boost the sales of electric cars and hybrids, sources told the DPA news agency ahead of the summit. Direct subsidies to car buyers would account for 600 million euros, and another 300 million would be invested in extending the network of fast-recharging stations. The remaining 100 million would go to other EV-related subsidies. Transport Minister Dobrint had also proposed canceling the license tax on electrical cars for a period of 10 years. In addition, 20 percent of vehicles purchased by the federal government would have to be electric-powered. As of January, there were 45 million cars in Germany, with only 25,500 pure electric vehicles and 130,000 hybrids. The government, however, aims to put one million electric cars on the road by 2020.”
So even by 2020, they will be just over 2% of the car fleet. And to be consistent, he should talk about electric car in Norway. From Reuters:

“Norway’s electric car policies are hard to imitate. Norway can be generous because high revenues from oil and gas production have helped it amass the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund, worth $1 trillion. Illustrating the supportive benefits, a Volkswagen e-Golf electric car sells for 262,000 crowns ($32,300) in Norway, just fractionally above the import price of 260,000, according to the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association. But a comparable gasoline-powered Golf, which costs just 180,000 crowns to import, ends up selling for 298,000 crowns after charges including value added tax, carbon tax, and another tax based on the weight of the vehicle. Even in Norway, the benefits strain finances. Norway’s 1.3 trillion Norwegian crown budget projects a loss of tax revenues of 3 billion crowns a year because of electric cars.”

chrism56

No Griff your comments are like the Panmure Bridge – your subsidies on fossil fuels are almost exclusively in third world dictatorships. There are basically none in OECD countries. And externalities aren’t subsidies. Contast that with the subsidies on electric cars In Norway I note, “Norway exempts new electric cars from almost all taxes and grants perks that can be worth thousands of dollars a year in terms of free or subsidized parking, re-charging and use of toll roads, ferries and tunnels. ” Even in NZ, there is a significant subsidy, possibly $2-3k a year.
And why don’t you talk about electric car sales in Denmark where they removed the subsidies.
The world isn’t moving away from fossil fuels. O&G consumption is increasing and coal is even going back up in its biggest market.https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/28/reuters-america-chinas-2018-coal-consumption-rose-after-three-year-decline-clean-energy-portion-up.html

BEIJING, Feb 28 (Reuters) – China’s coal consumption last year picked up for the first time since 2013, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Wednesday, despite Beijing’s push to promote less-polluting energy sources.

The world’s biggest coal consumer used 0.4 percent more coal in absolute terms in 2017 compared to a year ago, the bureau said in its annual National Social and Economic Development communique, without giving the value of total coal consumption.

However, as a portion of total energy consumption, coal usage fell 1.6 percentage points to 60.4 percent last year, while clean energy, including natural gas and renewables, rose 1.3 percentage points to 20.8 percent from 2016, the communique showed.

blockquote>

I’ve shown you exponential curves for renewables many times .
YET
You keep thinking in straight lines… That’s how both the IEA and EIA fuckup their projections and thats why you a wrong about the future .

chrism56

As usual Griff, you are spouting your usual rubbish. The actual consumption of fossil fuels (and carbon dioxide levels resulting from it) are increasing in absolute terms. That is what is supposed to be causing the climate change, isn’t it?
With regard to the OECD document you linked to, yet again you didn’t even bother to read it in your usual confirmation bias. You can use Google but can’t read. It talks of externalities and the subsidies in third world energy producers being the subsidisers , confirming what I wrote
Electric cars do not pay the about 76c per litre that petrol drivers pay in tax (or RUCs for diesels), they get reduced registration, they are allowed to charge and park in places for free. They can also use bus lanes can’t they?

This publication is concerned with all policies that directly support the production or consumption of fossil fuels in OECD countries and in a selection of partner economies.

Hand waving without support seems to be your modus operandi.
Are you in training to be a windmill?

“Pigeon chess” or “like playing chess with a pigeon”[note 1] is a figure of speech originating from a comment made in March 2005 on Amazon by Scott D. Weitzenhoffer[2] regarding Eugenie Scott’s book Evolution vs. Creationism: An introduction:
“”Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.

As such “debating techniques” are not limited to creationists, the phrase has entered the general Internet lexicon,[3] together with the source quotation, which is sometimes cited as an anonymous “Internet law”. The reference to creationists is usually replaced with whatever group the user is arguing with.

Thats you buddy .

chrism56

Read pages 20-22 of the OECD report, Griff, and think (a novel experience for you, I realise) about what it actually means. Then look at what the report define as price gaps – like the 3.6 trillion cost assigned to air pollution that is called a subsidy. Or not charging fishing boats road user charges on their fuel is a subsidy, or giving cheaper power to pensioners as a fossil fuel subsidy.
That is why the report suits you – it is full of shit.

Griff

ROFLMAO
yess chism
More futile handwaving
The OECD report is full of shite because some anonymous knob on the internet says so
So is Siemens and GE on smart grids, Genesis Energy on its asset use, Australian Energy Market Operator in the Tesla batteries,
yada yada yada
The pattern
Chrism56 discounts anything that doesn’t fit what he wants by hand waving.
Pigeon chess .

admiralvonspee

We gave him a document to say that between February and October last year our electricity went up $110 million as an industry sector. That’s independent supermarkets. Our members were ­coming off old contracts and going on to new contracts.

“We needed to show him these examples. Because margins are so slim in supermarkets we’ve got nowhere to go. That could cost us 2500 jobs. … The only lever in variable costs we have to pull is in employment.”

Len Morabito, general manager of four SUPA IGAs and a freestanding liquor store, said he was $215,000 worse off than at this time last year because of electricity price increases. He said this was a 31 per cent rise from the 2016-17 financial year.

Mr Morabito said the four ­supermarkets were scatted across regional Victoria in Leongatha, Korumburra, Shepparton and Bendigo.

The business runs a warehouse and its headquarters out of Moorabbin, in southeast Melbourne, and employs more than 500 people.

“I can’t believe the lack of uproar,” he said. “It’s just ridiculous … I don’t think we’ve seen it come through in grocery prices, but sooner or later it’s going to hit.”

Gezza

Gezza

Kitty Catkin

Many ‘EVs’ only go 100km on a charge. That means that someone could not go from Hamilton to Auckland, or even Huntly to Auckland, without a recharge. In reality, it’s not even a 100km round trip to anywhere, because it wouldn’t allow for any travelling around. What happens when someone’s charge runs out ?